8 practical summaries on improving community retention

Brands often consult Da Nian. The company has obviously invested a large number of operations teams, and is thinking about how to provide benefits and coupons to community users every day. It has also formulated various community operation SOPs, but the private domain communities just cannot become active and the retention rate is extremely poor . They don’t know where the problem lies.

Today, Da Nian has summarized 8 experiences that can help improve community retention from years of practical community operations. If you find them helpful, you might as well let your operations team try them out.

1. Strict community access

Many brands may have such misunderstandings in the early stage of private domain: in order to facilitate reporting or external publicity and packaging, the larger the scale of the community, the better, and the more people, the better. If one or two promotions are combined to increase the private domain GMV, the story will be even better. In order to achieve results in the short term, the operators are eager to pull all the traffic into the community.

In the past, Da Nian was violently pulled into the brand welfare group by women's brands such as "x Beauty Diary" and "xx Underwear". Of course, this kind of entry rule with no threshold has indeed made the scale of the community grow rapidly, but it has also made the group full of all kinds of "old perverts" and "advertising parties". It is only a matter of time before the "smoky and chaotic" community becomes a "dead group" .

A community is a circle of people with common characteristics. The depth of these common characteristics will affect the life cycle, activity and value of the community. Therefore, sometimes the poor retention rate and high exit rate of a community may have nothing to do with what content you push in the group every day, but rather that your community has no commonalities at all, or the commonalities are not strong enough .

When building a maternal and infant brand community, Da Nian once conducted actual tests and found that the retention rate and activity of mixed groups of mothers in different cities were not as good as those of regional groups of mothers based on a certain city; and the activity and retention of pure regional groups of mothers were far lower than those of groups of mothers divided by age groups.

The finer the granularity of the label, the stronger the commonality of the community. This requires brands to do the work up front in many cases. Is a user an exposed user, an interested user, a first-time buyer, or a loyal customer? When users enter our private domain, can we obtain as many tags as possible from users through surveys, forms, and cross-platform order data integration? Then based on these tags, users can be diverted to more targeted communities?

Of course, if we have to operate a general group, we must also have a clear goal to continuously refine user labels and divert communities through content delivery, topic discussions, event planning, and product testing.

80% of the value is usually created by only 20% of users. Therefore, our goal is to discover and cultivate these 20% of precise and valuable users, rather than wasting too much energy on the "inefficient operation" of general traffic.

2. Clarify the value of the community

The essence of brand communication is the repeated repetition of its own brand value proposition. For example, all advertisements for Dove chocolate highlight two words - silky. The same applies to private domain communities. When users enter the brand’s community, we must make it clear to users what the value of entering our community is, whether it is being able to check in and help each other or the weekly benefits, and repeat this to users over and over again in different ways.

There are many ways to make group members understand the value of the community: we need to give the group a clearer name , such as "Shanghai xx Yoga Exchange Group"; we need to have simple and eye-catching group rules to let users know what they can get and what they cannot do in the community; we can regularly update group announcements to remind users how to participate and gain community value, such as "Check in for 7 consecutive days to get free xx brand yoga clothes."

Of course, the above is just what the brand/group owner said, just like a "seller's show". We can also guide KOCs and arrange water armies to "speak for us" and use the third-party "buyer's show" to let users perceive the value of the community in a more objective tone.

In many cases, rather than saying that many brands don’t know how to clearly convey the value of the community to users, it is better to say that many brands have not thought clearly about what value they can convey to users through the community. You can read another article I wrote before, "What misunderstandings turn your private domain into a cheap "wool group"? ” to examine your own community value.

3. Community Function Binding

Before entering a restaurant and scanning the code to order food, we often have to follow the merchant’s official account. Before forming a community or operating a community, we can also set some rules to force users to stay in the group in order to obtain the established community value.

For example, when we were doing community operations for a parent-child restaurant of an international fast food giant, the places for the weekly offline parent-child activities we planned had to be signed up within the community; and the high-definition photos of each offline parent-child activity could only be collected within the group. "Registration" and "receiving high-definition photos" are the biggest demands of mothers for the community. After being deeply integrated with the community, the retention rate of mothers is also very high.

When it comes to making a living, the most important thing is to get out. To operate a community, you must first keep people in the community before you can talk about operations. Only if mothers are willing to stay in the parent-child restaurant community can we enable them to continue to create value for us through a series of operational actions.

4. User Habit Development

We often see various types of "21-day check-in training camps" because generally speaking, it takes 21 days to guide users to develop a new habit. In the process of cultivating user habits, we will use regular and fixed-point supervision, combined with some incentive mechanisms, to help users form the habit of "checking in in groups".

The same is true for operating communities. We need to package users’ demands and needs into different types of community content, and “feed” them to users at regular intervals and locations, so that users can form the habit of “staying in the group”, such as expert Q&A at 8pm every Tuesday, welfare broadcast at 4pm every Friday, knowledge cards at 8am every day …

To cultivate community user habits, "community operation SOP" is very important . We must not only make it clear what value we want to deliver to users, but also break down these value points and interest points into every day and every content delivery, so that each of our actions corresponds to an operational goal. Over time, users' "biological clock" for the community will be formed.

5. Community Incentive Ranking

In the mobile game Honor of Kings, there is a friend ranking PK. In order to get a higher ranking, the user's gaming time has unknowingly increased. The same is true for operating a community. Once there is a PK mechanism within the community, users will have to pay more time costs in order to compete for spiritual rewards in a specific circle, or simply to obtain certain material rewards.

To give a simple example, we can set up a points system within the community and agree with group users that the top 5 users on the monthly community points rankings can receive a trial gift package for the brand’s new products that month. Through the rules for obtaining points, we can achieve our operational goals: points can be linked to consumption, such as earning points for consumption and earning points for posting orders on social networks; they can also be linked to user behavior, such as earning points for signing in, earning points for actively answering users' questions, earning points for invitations, and so on.

The user habit formation I mentioned in point 4 is more of a cumulative process in which users passively accept the user's behavior. Incentive ranking, on the other hand, directly sets a limited-time and limited-quantity incentive goal (identity honors or physical rewards) for users to actively motivate them to participate. It is very helpful for improving community retention, promoting activity and even improving conversion rates.

6. Community elimination mechanism

In the early stages of community operations, we have to "accommodate" users, set prizes according to their preferences, and provide the value they need, in order to make users willing to stay in our community. But in the long run, whether it is the prizes we pay or the time and energy of the operators themselves, they are all operating costs for the brand.

After most users have understood the value of the community and even developed certain habits of "staying in the group", we should take advantage of users' fear of loss in a timely manner and use a similar "elimination mechanism" to further assist in achieving our operational goals.

For example, in Little Red Riding Hood’s community, in order to stimulate user consumption, she will rank users according to their consumption amount every quarter. Only the 50 users with the highest consumption amount are eligible to enter the VIP community. If their consumption falls out of the top 50 in the next quarter, they will be eliminated from the group.

The “elimination mechanism” will make some of our benefits and privileges appear more scarce. In order to squeeze into the top 50, or for fear of falling out of the top 50, users will be more motivated to consume.

7. Strictly control community welfare

Brands often complain to Da Nian about why, even though their communities often distribute benefits, users are not enthusiastic. There may be two reasons: First, many times, what brands think are benefits may not always be what users want; second, the pace of benefit distribution and user expectations are not controlled, turning the community into a "wool group."

How to break it? First of all, don’t equate the benefits that the brand has with the benefits that users want. Brands should know what benefits users really need . For example, before users have a complete understanding of a brand, some physical benefits that allow users to feel the quality of a product may be more sincere than 20% or 40% off coupons for a product. For example, for mothers, instead of giving out some unknown brand of maternal and child products, even if they are given away for free, they may not be welcomed by mothers, because mothers will not be careless about the products they use for their babies.

Secondly, too much is as bad as too little. Too frequent welfare distribution may have the opposite effect. We must learn to control the rhythm and frequency of welfare distribution in order to control user expectations. Based on our practical experience in the community over the years, 1-2 welfare benefits per week is optimal.

Finally, we need to design a good path for obtaining benefits. Before users obtain benefits, they have to pay a certain cost . This cost can be a time cost, such as points obtained by daily sign-ins, or it can be the interpersonal cost of sharing fission, such as asking friends for help.

Provide benefits that users really need, control the pace of benefit distribution, and raise the threshold for obtaining benefits. If you do the above three things, you will find that it is not difficult to make good use of weekly benefits to improve retention rate and promote activity.

8. Organize user social networking

If you join a brand community, and apart from being able to grab some benefits from the group occasionally, you don’t know anyone in the group, and no one responds to your occasional words, will you want to quit the group before long?

On the contrary, if you join a community like this, where the group owner organizes users to discuss various topics of interest every day, and everyone has a great time chatting in the group and quickly makes friends with similar interests, and the group owner occasionally organizes offline activities to bring everyone closer together through face-to-face contact, would you be less tempted to quit the group?

Generally speaking, when users develop social relationships in a community, they have an additional bond to stay in the community and even actively maintain the community. Many times, users are willing to join a community just to join a circle of like-minded people. The social value they want to obtain is no less than their expectations for the brand itself.

Therefore, by occasionally holding offline activities, actively initiating hot topics that are in line with the common characteristics of users, discovering and cultivating KOCs and water armies to set the pace for the community, and constantly changing the relationship within the community from a point-like connection between the group owner and individual users to a network relationship between the group owner and users, and between users , the operation of the community will be more solid, and retention, activity and even conversion will be taken to a higher level.